If you have online ads with great looking images and phrases but they are not making you profits, you may need to fix the basics of your marketing funnel path. The marketing funnel draws your audience to your point of sale, execute transactions and follows up with re-marketing. The path includes: Planning, Reaching, Action, Converting, and Engaging. Once all is in place, your Ads can be profitable.

PLAN – Understand what constitutes a target market and make sure your Ads are getting in front of the correct target market. Your website, SEO and social networks should all be in place before launching Ad campaigns. Check your branding. Make sure your Ads are attractive to your audience and clearly communicate why your products or services are relevant to their lives?

REACH – Be sure all partners involved are taking the right steps for reaching your target market when publishing, promoting and sharing your Ads. Make sure the outpost and networks they are targeting your Ads to reach actually draw people back to your website.

ACT – Be sure your website content is useful to visitors. Once online traffic land on your website, make sure your interactive tools such as blogs, catalogs, forms, shopping cart, etc… are up to professional standards and inspire your visitors to act.

CONVERT – Capitalize on your marketing investment, convert traffic into gains. Make sure your website design and functionality can delivery you your assets. Such as processing sales, delivering you leads and orders. Improve and add to what works and eliminate what does not in your marketing funnel.

ENGAGE – Happy customers are your best social marketing advocates, they are key to repeat business and referrals. Build and keep a client list, follow up and re-market.

Pablo Picasso’sFemmes d’Alger (1955) is set to become the most expensive painting in the world.

Picasso’s Femmes d’ Alger for auction, starting at $100 million.

The Femmes d’Alger (Women of Algiers), is a vibrantly-hued piece, painting by Picasso in 1955. It belongs to an unnamed private owner and is now considered the most important painting by Picasso. Before Femmes d’ ALger, Picasso’s most famous painting was, Guernica, named after a village in the Basque country which bombed during the Spanish civil war. Another painting by Picasso, the La Coiffeuse (The Hairdresser) painted in 1911 made headlines when it was stolen in France, and showed up 14 years later in New York.

Picasso a Spaniard, spent most of his life in France, died in 1973 aged 91. He painted a series of 15 variations of Femmes d’Alger between December 1954 and February 1955. Today’s auction for Femmes d’Adger (Version “O”) is the last of the 15 paintings in the series.

Pablo Picasso’s inspiration for Femmes d’Adger comes from the famous 19th century painting by Delacroix, Women of Algiers in their Apartment, which depicts Algerian women in a harem smoking a hookah. The original 15 versions were all owned by the late private New York collectors Victor and Sally Ganz, who bought the entire series from Picasso’s dealer Daniel Kahnweiler in Paris June 1956 for around $250,000. Later the series was broken up and sold to art dealers, and the Femmes d’ Alger (Version “O”) was sold to private collectors. After which the painting was last auctioned at Christie’s in New York, for 31.9 million. Today the starting bid is set to begin at $100 million and estimated to sell for over $140 million. If the auction goes over $142 mil Picasso’s Femmes d’Adger (Version “O”) will be the most expensive painting ever sold at auction.UPDATE: SOLD!! Femmes d’Adgers, May 11 2015 at Christie’s for $179 million.Watch at https://youtu.be/ygbZSWqjDH4To see more Picasso’s work, you can visit Artsy’s Picasso page for more paintings and exclusive articles.

If you’re an executive, entrepreneur or business owner exploring writing your own content, you may soon discover that you do not have enough time to do all the writing yourself. Getting help for your online marketing is the way to go; but remember it’s important that you do not become isolated from your own brand in the process. Regardless of the size of your company or how busy you are, you should practice occasionally writing on your company’s behalf. Your content creates the reputation of your brand, who’s better to represent your brand than yourself? Content attracts new customers and increases search result stability for your business. Writing in your brand’s voice will allow you to better direct the message of your brand. If you are in the US, you can hire professional American content writers to help with the bulk of your content, while you write the occasional article and assign help on all the other online marketing areas for your company. Such as keyword programming, marketing campaigns, social media management, etc. Once you find good help, you should only need to write articles yourself from time to time, so that you remain connected to the perspective of your brand. Doing this will also free you up a bit, allowing you to remain focus on your company’s larger overall marketing strategy.